Williams drivers' uphill struggles persist in Canada

There weren't many positives to take away from Friday's free practice sessions for Williams, the British outfit still struggling to improve its problematic FW41.

The Grove-based outfit focused on front end aerodynamic work in the morning and low and high fuel load runs in the afternoon.

Performance however remained subdued with Lance Stroll and Sergey Sirotkin making up the numbers at the tail end of the field.

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The Russian rookie was particularly critical of how the Williams FW41 contended with Pirelli's soft tyre compound in FP2.

"It was a tough session and we have a lot of room for improvement," he said.

"The morning wasn’t too bad and even though we weren’t in the quickest position, we knew where we could easily gain more lap time.

"FP2 didn’t go so well and I struggled to get anything out of the tyre. We know how important it is this year. Putting it right, I think it’s quite a big thing to improve.

"It’s not always been so easy for us to understand how to extract more from the tyre at the moment. It was much better in FP1 with the prime tyre, but on the softer compounds, it didn’t work."

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